This is also one of the premises of Kurt Anderson's book "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History". Although the scope of the book is large an

This is also one of the premises of Kurt Anderson's book "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History". Although the scope of the book is large and argues that American's irrationality runs deep, he points out that since the 1970s or so American popular culture has become more and more inward looking, obsessed with reviving the past and remaking the old rather than creating new things (very much along the lines of what is described in the opening of this article). On the technological and economic side, this also reminds me of the arguments in David Graber's article "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit". It is hard to argue with the fact the scope of truly new things is smaller than it was in say, the 1960s, when space flight and supersonic travel started, and popular culture was barely recognizable from the beginning of the decade to the end. People growing up in that era truly believed that at that rate of change, they would be living on Mars and working 15 hours a week and have a totally new organization of society by the early 2000s. [0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/209776/fantasyland-by-kurt-andersen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/209776/fantasyland-... [1] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...